Barenaked Ladies: If I had a compulsory blanket music license

Barenaked Ladies guitarist Steven Page talks to Ars about how a compulsory …

Plenty of ink has been spilled in arguments over the proper business model for music in the P2P age. The publishers generally want to hold onto the current market-based system, but there are voices in the wilderness arguing that a compulsory license model actually makes the most sense for both artists and consumers. One of those voices is Steven Page, singer and guitarist for the Barenaked Ladies, who recently spoke to Ars about this issue and called for an ISP-based licensing model that would allow consumers access to all the music they want and would ensure that artists get paid. But the US Register of Copyrights, Marybeth Peters, calls this a bad idea.

Here's the idea: compulsory licenses allow anyone to take advantage of whatever works are covered by the license without obtaining the permissions that would otherwise be required. It is essentially an exception made to copyright law that takes away a person's right to control how copies of their material are handled. This doesn't mean a compulsory license is free, though, only that the rate is determined by statute.

The best known of these in the US is the mechanical license. Songwriters and their publishers receive this rate—currently set at $.091 per song—for every copy of an album sold that features their song. Music labels are free to negotiate a lower rate, and many do (75 percent of the mechanical rate is common), but they can simply choose to pay the mechanical royalty rate without negotiations.

Steven Page wants to see the model extended to music consumers, who would pay a flat fee in order to legally access any digital music they can get their hands on—and no one would need to obtain a license from a record label to distribute that music. Dressed in gray suit and sneakers, Page is an articulate spokesman for his position, which is premised on the idea that "music pirates" are actually "fans" and shouldn't be punished for wanting to hear music. They should pay for the privilege, but that payment should be low and kept as simple as possible. And they should be allowed to redistribute and mash up material.

"Not everyone's an artist," Page says, "but people can now express themselves like artists do, by sharing something that means something to them. If we had a system of compulsory licenses, they don't have to worry about going and getting a license to do it, or circumventing the system."

Canada does something a bit like this in that it places levies on blank media; that money is then distributed to artists. But the system "works better in principle than it does in practice," Page says. Blank media prices stay high, and only Canadian artists are a part of the system, which means that "I'm getting paid, but 50 Cent's not."

The ISP solution

The other problem is the formula used to distribute the cash. It's based on radio play and record sales, but Page points out that "what's being downloaded from the Internet and burned to CDs is usually not that stuff." Instead, he proposes the ISP model, where ISPs simply build an amount—$5 or $10 a month, for instance—into their fees, all of which is distributed to artists based on tracking data from P2P networks, etc.

ISPs are the natural place to collect such a fee, he thinks, because they provide the gateway for people to access digital media. "People don't like paying for music," Page admits, but says that "it's not because they think it's free, they just don't like the process." This would make that process simpler and remove the shackles of DRM that prevent interoperability. ISPs who choose to filter P2P traffic could offer access to those who don't want digitial music, but Page thinks most people would find a blanket license a great deal.

But will it happen? The nation's top copyright official, Marybeth Peters, said at a recent LexisNexis/Variety DRM conference that it's not something she wants to see. "I hope we don't go to a system of compulsory licenses," she said. "I don't see how any creator benefits from a compulsory license." None of the other industry executives expressed much love for the plan, either, arguing that the market would work out all of its current interoperability problems on its own, and that a compulsory license would stifle innovation.

But Page is adamant. "We need to get our music where our fans want it," he says, "not the other way around."